Rebecca Richards-Kortum Biography

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is a Rice University Malcolm Gillis University Professor and an American bioengineer. She is a professor in the Bioengineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments at Rice University, as well as the Director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health and the Founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. Professor Richards-research Kortum's and teaching are focused on producing low-cost, high-performance technologies for low-resource settings, guided by the idea that all people across the world deserve access to health innovation. She is well-known for bringing life-saving health technologies to vulnerable people in underdeveloped countries, with an emphasis on illnesses and conditions that cause high morbidity and death, such as cervical and oral cancer, preterm delivery, and malaria. Richards-Kortum is also leading a multi-institutional collaboration to build a bundle of 17 life-saving newborn devices for low-resource settings that have the same efficacy as those used in North America but at a quarter of the price. Multidisciplinary partnerships involving physicians and researchers at Rice, the UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Baylor College of Medicine, UT Health Science Center-Houston, and the British Columbia Cancer Agency are testing and using current technology. Richards-Kortum and associates have been translating these technologies from North America to low- and medium-resource developing nations over the past few years (Malawi, China, Botswana, El Salvador, and Brazil). Richards-research Kortum's has resulted in 40 patents and over 310 peer-reviewed academic articles. The National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, USAID, Whitaker Foundation, and Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation have all generously supported her teaching programs, research, and collaborations. Richards-Kortum is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Arts and Sciences of the United States. The Pierre Galletti Award, given by The American Institute for Medical and Biomedical Engineering (AIMBE), was bestowed to her in 2016. In 2002 and 2006, she was designated a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. In 2014, she shared the Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation with Maria Oden. She graduated from the University of Nebraska with a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics, an M.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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